Fred Morley Milkman
Featured

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am working on a number of different old black & white photos that I am converting into colour. Each photo presents a new challenge and gives me something new to learn, experimenting with different colour pallets, blending modes and varying the opacity of various layer masks etc to try and produce a more natural looking result. This particular photo was taken in 1940 by Fred Morely during the Blitz and is supposedly of a milkman still on his rounds despite houses all around being bombed out. In actual fact the milkman was Fred Morleys assistant and not a milkman at all. Whilst the rest of the scene is entirely real, Fred borrowed the clothes and milkcrate from a real milkman and got his assistant to pose for the shot. The reason for taking the shot was quite simple. There had been nightly bombing for over a month by this time of the war and Fred knew that if he showed all the destruction of the Blitz in a negative way, it would never make it past the censors. Instead he staged this scene to demonstrate the maxim of "Keep Calm and Carry On".